Nicola Countouris discusses the report by the conservative Polish think tank Ordo Iuris, and the Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium.

‘The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union’  was published in March 2025 by the conservative Polish think tank Ordo Iuris, and the Hungarian private university Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an institution with close links to the Fidesz party of Prime Minister Orban. Ostensibly produced as a response to the  EU Treaty reform proposals endorsed by the European Parliament in November 2023, the 45-page is, for all purposes, a manifesto for EU reform sponsored by the European political (far) right.

Authors and ‘sponsors’

Two of its four co-authors are academics at Corvinus Collegium, the other two are the President of Ordo Iuris and one of its Consultative Board members. Despite some of its authors having some academic credentials, this is not an academic paper, it is a political document. The report was produced following a September 2024 conference organised by Ordo Iuris, in collaboration with US pro-Trump Heritage Foundation. Ordo Iuris is an ultra-conservative, Polish Catholic think tank with close links to the European political far right and  MAGA movement exponents, and part of a network of far right and pseudo-academic organisations and think tanks. It appears to have received significant funding from the previous Polish far-right ‘Law and Justice’ government. It is notorious for its anti-LGBT, anti-abortion and anti-divorce activism and recently advocated Poland leaving the WHO. In 2023, Ordo Iuris launched a campaign for the release of a neo-Nazi activist Marika Matuszak convicted of attacking an LGBT event, and she was released by PiS Justice Minister. In 2020, one of its founders was nominated President of the Polish Supreme Court (he was recently removed by the current government).

Nationalist grievances and intergovernmentalist parlance

Sections I and II of the report contain a long list of nationalist grievances and far right tropes against the process of European integration. There is nothing particularly new with them, and those familiar with the Brexit debates will have heard them all. The EU has gone well beyond the original purpose and is morphing into a federal super state ‘with its own currency’ and ‘capable of striking down national laws’; it deploys ‘judicial legislation imposed by a supranational court of unelected judges’; the EU is undemocratic because the Commission, Court and Central Bank are unelected, and because Member States in the Council are increasingly subject to majority vote without a chance to veto, while the EP is a parliament without a demos; EU law supremacy and direct effect undermine national sovereignty, as does ‘competence creep’ and the ever expanding legal bases in areas that should have been of exclusive national competence (such as family law); EU liberal values threaten traditional national values but also EU wokeness threatens national civil liberties; EU undermines security, especially through mass migration and multiculturalism; EU bureaucracy, red tape, and centralisation stifles competitiveness. Some of the grievances appear to be targeting a specific – perhaps Eastern European – audience, such as the grotesque suggestion that ‘the imposition of so-called “European Values” and “cultural Europeanism,” […] bear eerie resemblance to the concepts of “Soviet Man” and “Soviet Culture”’. 

There is nothing original in most of these grievances. The report attempts to dress them into the somewhat more respectable ‘intergovernmentalist’ parlance, intergovernmentalism being a legitimate political science theory whose proponents (academics like Andrew Moravcsik) emphasized the role of national governments in the EU integration process. It suggests that integration progresses when national interests align and member states cooperate, and slows down when interests diverge. By contrast, ‘supranationalism’ is a theory that suggests that Member States must cede some degree of sovereignty to a higher supranational authority, in order to pursue common policies that they cannot pursue in isolation or merely through cooperation. 

In reality the history of EU integration is a mix of both intergovernmental and supranational dynamics. Most of the supranational traits of the EU were developed (and requested) by member states who realised that in order to achieve their economic cooperation objectives in certain sectors, they needed to integrate other (economic and political) sectors, a ‘neo-functionalist’ process that generated a ‘spill-over’ effect leading to further integration, eventually creating a more integrated and complex political entity. There is nothing deterministic, inescapable, or irreversible about this process, as Brexit testifies. The report fails to acknowledge the nuances of a complex and subtle academic question, and even the references to intergovernmentalism (a bona fide theory) are non-contextual and imprecise. But then, this is clearly not an academic project, but a political one.

Two scenarios for the Future of Europe, both seeking to reduce the EU to an area of free trade 

Section III of the report sets out two alternative scenarios for the future of the EU and for the future of EU institutional and governance reform. The first scenario is a ‘Back to the Roots’ vision for the EU, in essence an attempt to turn back the clock of EU integration back to 1957 and the ‘original’ purpose of the EU: establishing a common market where the factors of production could circulate freely. To turn the clock back it sets out 23 recommendations, all aimed at reducing EU prerogatives, competencies, powers, and undoing the various Treaty reforms that Member States have agreed in the past 50 years. The general thrust of these proposals is to diminish the supranational institutions of the EU (Commission, EP, Court) and bolster the powers of MS in the more intergovernmental bodies (Council and EU Council), including by granting back a veto power.

The second scenario seems to portray a more radical reconfiguration of the EU as a regional cooperation body, governed by public international law (as opposed by EU law as a new and separate legal order of international law, with its own specific rules and peculiarities, including supremacy and direct effect, that the authors of the report strongly object to). Its main purpose would be to ‘offer a framework focused on economic cooperation, free market principles, strict limits on regulatory intervention and the full exercise of the four basic freedoms’. In reality there is little or no significant difference between the two scenarios. Ultimately both seek to reduce the EU to a free trade area mainly or exclusively focusing on running  a common market based on the four freedoms.

The political objectives: free market and national backsliding of civil, political, and social rights

The report pursues two fundamental political objectives. Firstly, it envisions an ‘originalist’ future for the EU, that should regress, essentially, to the common market project of 1957. This is clear from both the recommendations and from the two scenarios contained in the report. Some minor nuances aside, this is essentially what its authors and sponsors pursue: a European free market project, which needs to be enshrined in a Treaty and facilitated by supranational bodies. Reforms will also have to ensure that ‘social affairs … will be the exclusive competence of nation-states’ (page 37). 

The second objective is seemingly less obvious, but quite evident from the strong objections raised against EU values, in reality an objection against the EU protecting civil, political, social, and economic fundamental rights. Pages 19-21 of the report denounce ‘European values’ and the EU seeking to ‘forge a new collective identity by invoking banal and nebulous concepts such as diversity, respect for freedom, rights and dignity, the rule of law, equality, political pluralism, the separation of powers, democracy, protection of minorities, and respect of civil society’. But while these values are protected (to some extent) by the EU, they are all enshrined in the constitutions of its Member States (old and new) and also protected by the European Convention of Human Rights. 

In reality, the Great Reset report rejects the emergence of these EU constitutional values and fundamental rights because they are perceived as a fastidious bulwark against the regression of civil and political rights agenda pursued by the far right domestically.  The far right (in the EU and beyond) wants to see a backsliding of post-WW2 social democratic and liberal constitutionalism at a national level. It realises that it cannot achieve this goal as long as the EU and the ECHR protect these values at a supranational level. At the same time, the far right is in favour of free markets and deregulation, although clearly it is still not entirely capable of reconciling nationalist and economic protectionist agendas with tariff-free movement of goods.

In conclusion, there is nothing particularly new, original, or academically valuable in this report. It represents very transparently the political agenda pursued by far-right politics in Europe and beyond. In that sense, it is at least helpful for its intellectual honesty – the mask has slipped, and Europeans can see very clearly what the far rights has in store for them. Under the guise of a ‘back to the roots’ vision on the future of the EU, far right parties are really pursuing a globalist free market agenda in tandem with a nationalist fundamental rights regression agenda. We’ve been warned.

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Nicola Countouris is Professor of Labour Law and European Law at the UCL Faculty of Laws.

Note: The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.

Photo: Banner in front of European Commission building, installed with the entry of the von der Leyen Commission. Copyright European Union 2024, photo by Lukasz Kobus.